Friend’s iPhone 7 is disabled

Hi, wondering if anyone could help us out.
So my friend has been having some problems with her iPhone – alarms not going off, unable to phone people, unable to receive or send messages.
Today she turned it off and then on again, and it was disabled and displaying the message “IPhone is disabled, connect to iTunes”
The problem is when she downloaded iTunes to connect, we get an error message saying “iTunes could not connect to the iPhone because it is locked with a passcode. You must enter the passcode on the iPhone before it can be used with iTunes” …. which we cannot do because the iPhone is still displaying the “iPhone is disabled” screen with no way to input the passcode.
Any help or advice would be appreciated. Ideally she doesn’t want to have to reset her iPhone as she doesn’t have any backup of the content. Thanks!